Introduction: scope and emphasis

The other chapters of this book have examined some of the rich and evolving body of theory developed within the recordkeeping disciplines and professions. The purpose of this chapter is to outline the ways in which philosophies and theories from beyond the bounds of recordkeeping have influenced ‘our’ discourses and practices. It aims to consider the lineage of ideas that have had an impact on our thinking in the context of the broader streams of Western thought from which they have been adopted.

To cover the vast potential area of this topic is clearly impossible in the scope of a single chapter. What is presented here will be cursory, highly selective and greatly simplified; it is pitched at the level of ‘big-picture’ philosophy rather than models and techniques, which necessarily serves to deemphasize the considerable influence of the more technocratic borrowings from business and information science. Its treatment of historiography, a fundamental external influence, is minimalist. It suffers from various severe parochialisms – for instance, it is based primarily on academic and professional journal literature and refers almost exclusively to Englishlanguage publications.

While, in one sense, philosophy applies to all aspects of records and archives, just as it applies to all aspects of life in general, it has been brought to bear more specifically on a number of issues, many of long standing but some more directly linked to recent social, cultural and technological developments. The most basic aspects of recordkeeping depend on a number of concepts and assumptions about how we interact with the world – whether there is an external reality to which we can gain direct or even indirect access; whether our modes of expression and communication (including records) can adequately represent the acts and thoughts of which they are traces, whether the record is as much a means of structuring or even of creating ‘reality’ as it is of representing it.

This chapter starts its journey with Immanuel Kant (section 2), whose inauguration of modern philosophy brings all of these things to the fore, along with other perennial questions relating to the way that human beings live or should live within society and the need to balance or reconcile competing social and individual needs and desires.